AOA all,
As you all know, Zahid Sindhu has graciously hosted the linuxpakistan.net website and mailing list for free for more than 4+ years now (first at Nexus.net.pk, then more recently at Inspedium Corp.). However, we have outgrown the resources provided to us. We have been suffering from a serious disk space crunch on the server for several months now, and I'd like us not to ask Inspedium for more resources than we're already getting. So, I've decided to migrate the site to a different hosting. This time, it's being volunteered by Junaid Uppal (AKA linuxgeek).

I'm planning to follow these steps to migrate the server:

1. Migrate DNS (completed last night)
2. Set up database replication schedule. I'll maintain a mirror site at the new hosting which will be at the most 1 hour old. (Being worked on as we speak)
3. Migrate www.linuxpakistan.net. This will require a 1 hour outage where I'll modify DNS to point to new hosting, and put a "Under Construction" message here while DNS propogates. (Will likely be done over this weekend).
4. Migrate list. This is a longer term goal. The biggest challenge will be migrating the list archives and membership database over. I'll need some help with this, so if you have mad mailman skillz, Uncle Fawad needs you.

If all goes well, there'll only be an ~ 1 hour outage. Please let me know if you have any reservations about this plan.

Hi Fawad,
i have a suggestion!
why not u move linuxpakistan on Joomla!
its only my suggestion.
we can do it by giving two links on main page.
one is for old phpbb and the new link to joomla!
old thread should be locked for new posts.

btw, i was also thinking to ask you for the code of the main page.
i can re-design in better way.
but i need codes. because of Last 10 Forum Posts & Last 10 News Posts.

AOA folks,
So I disabled the board here, enabled the new site, updated the DNS, and waited. And waited, and waited. My local DNS never picked up the change. Turns out that I screwed up, royally. I had the times SOA record for the linuxpakistan.net zone set way too high (minimum 1D, expiry 1W, etc.). Migrating with this DNS record in place would take WAY too much time.

Keeping that in mind, I've reverted the DNS to point back to the inspedium site, this time with much smaller timeouts (minimum 2H, expiry 6H). I'll let this zone (serial 2006072203) propogate before I attempt this stunt again.

I'd appreciate if someone with some knowledge of DNS would let me know if the new zone settings are good enough and what kind of expected downtime we're looking at for the switchover.

AOA folks,
Some of you might have encountered some errors from the site since I migrated it. The problem was that the new machine had mysql 3.23.x, while the original machine had 4.x. I used the mysqldump 3.23 compatibility mode, but unfortunately, it didn't copy over some attributes that were crucial to the correct execution of the apps.

I have upgraded the mysql to 5.0.x, used the original db schema and overlaid the current data. That should resolve the issue.

Please feel free to email me if you're encountering errors on the forum.

i'm glad you opened the dictionary and found that definition. there is hope for you yet.

now tell me, is there something about the chinese race that makes their writing look like nonsense typed on a keyboard? is there something about the chinese race that prevents them from writing programming languages in chinese?

if the answer to the above two questions is no, then why did you make the racist comment about the chinese?